"He says he wants to know you're well, and then to ask you something. In that order, he says." Kezia leaned forward. "I'm not your mother, Isabel. I'm an old woman who keeps bees, and I have no right to tell you anything. But I'll tell you this for nothing: you can go out there now and send him off proper so he knows, or you can let him come back in the morning. What you can't do is leave the man standing in my garden till the dew comes down. It isn't decent, and it isn't like you."
Isabel turned the unopened jar a quarter-turn on the table, and then another. Outside, very faintly, came the sound of the bucket being set down on the stones by the trough. Then she drew a long breath and let it go.
"Tell him he may come back in the morning," she said. "Tell him the inn at the ford keeps a clean bed. And tell him..." And here her voice went just for a moment, and came back. "Tell him to put his coat on. The wind gets up on this hill at night."
Kezia went out and told him. She watched his face while she did it. She would say afterwards to the only person she ever said it to that she had never in her life seen a grown man look so like a boy who has been let off a beating.
He put his coat on. He bowed to her—a proper bow, fit for a duchess. Then he led his horse down the track in the last of the light, and did not get on it until he was out of sight of the window.
That night, a year ago, the ballroom at Elmfern had blazed like a lantern in the dark park. The long windows stood open to the terrace for the heat. There were roses in every urn and wax candles in every sconce, and the whole county had come in its best, and it was all very fine.
Isabel stood where she always stood, against the wall behind Lady Livia's chair, in the pale blue silk that had been let out at the seams to fit her. She held the fan. She held the shawl. When the dancing began, she held Lady Livia's pearls as well.
"The clasp is loose," Lady Livia had said after the second dance, unwinding them from her throat with a little frown. "I shall lose them on the floor, and then where shall we be? Take them up and put them in the red case on my dressing table, there's a dear. And come straight back."
So Isabel had gone up the great stair with the pearls held in both hands, the way you carry something that is not yours and costs more than you will earn in your life. They were smooth and cold and lighter than she had expected, for a thing the whole county talked about. She laid them in the red leather case on the dressing table in the room that smelled of Lady Livia's orange-flower water, and she closed the lid and saw the jeweler's name stamped in gold inside it.
Then she came down again. The ballroom was very hot, and nobody would notice for a quarter of an hour whether she stood against the wall or not. So she went out by the side door onto the terrace to see whether the bees had gone home.